Charles Garabedian gets a worthy mention in The Wall Street Journal for his current exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery.
For the past 25 years, Charles Garabedian (b. 1923)—a beloved, slyly avuncular figure in the Los Angeles art world—has kept figurative painting honest. He’s done this by drawing badly very well (which keeps his paintings from being academically show-offy), and by putting on paint so adroitly that its expressionist whole disguises an expertise in the particular brushstroke. His color looks optimistically innocent, but it glows with subtle design.
Mr. Garabedian, an Air Force veteran of World War II, didn’t begin painting seriously until he was in his 30s. Since then, he’s absorbed everything from Giotto to Picasso to the painterly ease of his southern California compatriot, Richard Diebenkorn. Mr. Garabedian has had, of course, plenty of time to make his own vision based on all these sources—and, on the evidence of almost every one of his exhibitions since the 1970s, he has succeeded.
These large, ebullient acrylic-on-paper paintings derive from mythologies—Classical Greek, biblical and others—and probably (this is a guess) from Mr. Garabedian’s Armenian heritage. (His parents fled the Armenian genocide early in the 20th century, and he and his siblings lived for a time in an orphanage.)
—Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.
His exhibition of large scale works on paper “Mythical Realities,” is on view through February 21, 2015.
IMAGE: Charles Garabedian, “Cassandra,” 2014, acrylic on paper, 80 x 48 in. (203.2 x 121.9 cm)